Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath

I got this in Varanasi, India, with all the stuff about the current recession, climate change and so on going round my head... Of course, I'd heard of the Great Depression and the Dustbowl, but not having studied much history at school, didn't know a great deal of the history.

Anyway, The Grapes of Wrath (Amazon link) by John Steinbeck was first published in 1939 - 70 years ago.

It's a story of a family of Oklahoma farmers who, at the start of the book, have been forced off their 40 acre farm by a number of years of poor weather (actually, a return to the normal weather patterns, but much less rain than the preceding few years), non-Permaculture farming practises (leaving land bare rather than sowing a cover crop), and indebtedness to the banks/land companies (who lent the farmers money when crops failed, which they couldn't pay back).

The story is a very human one - it alternates between the story of the Joad family, heading from Oklahoma to California which they think is a land of plenty, and a general overview of what happened during the Dustbowl years. It is a story of human greed - Californian farmers over-advertising for labour in order to reduce wages to subsistence levels, and in the process leaving many many families with little or no income at all.

The thing that got me was that we're doing it all over again. Perhaps not in quite the same way, but.. in order for "us" to have our consumer lifestyle, people in the developing world are killing the planet - China is being desertified at a rate of 1300 square miles per year!

The core of the story is that it seems easier to give when you have nothing, that the best in humanity shines through at the hardest of times. The Grapes of Wrath is a fantastic book, really relevant to right now. I can't recommend it enough!